Saturday, January 26, 2013

Spam.

Every few hours during the day, I go clean out the blog's spam trap of the fifteen or twenty comments that will be lodged in it. The big spam storms come at night; first thing in the morning these days I'm scraping 150 to 300 or more comments out of the filters. It doesn't take that long to scroll through them and check for comments from real people, so I'm not going to turn on the word verification again, at least for now.

They seem to have stopped sending the ones with random chains of text that made such lovely found object art. I accidentally erased the dozen I had saved that I was planning on hammering into a 'James Joyce or HAL9000?' post, and now almost all the spam is simple crass chains of naked links hawking cheap copies of everything from designer handbags to Viagra, while infesting your computer with every sort of malware under the sun. Going to one of those sites would be like tying your yacht up at the docks in Mogadishu with your wallet hanging out of your pocket and a blinfold over your eyes.

The really most despicable spam is the stuff that's written to sound like it's from an actual blog commenter. "Hi! I just wanted to say how much I really love your site! Did you do the theme yourself? Your writing is so good!" This stuff is tailor made to hit Aunt Edna who's been posting recipes and pics of the grandkids into the ether for a while to no feedback, only to get suckered by some spam farm in Shanghai who pretends to be an actual reader... That's just extra scummy.

Spam is up a bit at my place as well, though the spam filter in use has been on the ball: 451 comments received, 112 identified correctly as spam, one false positive, one missed entirely, 337 posted properly.

A web security company in Israel ( Blue Security ) had a solution to this: they offered a service that went directly to the business sites the spammers were pimping, and filled their order forms with gigabytes of random junk.

They were shut down and bankrupted by a long DOS attack by a Russian spammer ... who was killed by a contract killer in Russia after the bankruptcy, for some unknown reason.

My "favorite" so far is the two parter - the one where spambot A tells you the content's great but won't load on their browser, and a couple days later an ad from spambot B for a company to cross-browsify your template.

That last kind you mentioned reminds me of this strip from Dark Legacy: http://www.darklegacycomics.com/356.html Not the same thing, of course, but amusing just the same. Scum suckers with actual sales skills.